UNTWO, the United Nations Tourism World Organisation fully released the 2010 statistics for international tourism earlier in February. It was revealed that Malaysia was the ninth most visited country in the world. For a country that most people have never even heard of, that’s an amazing feat.
The top ten most visited countries with the number of international travellers in year 2010:
1. France – 76.8 million
2. United States – 59.7 million
3. China – 55.7 million
4. Spain – 52.7 million
5. Italy – 43.6 million
6. United Kingdom – 28.1 million
7. Turkey – 27.0 million
8. Germany – 26.9 million
9. Malaysia – 24.6 million
10. Mexico – 22.4 million
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But if you scrutinise the details, you will understand why. More than half of the tourist arrivals are from Singapore. Malaysian will go – “No wonder!” Singapore used to be a part of the Malaysian federation and both nations share a common culture.
Malaysia, particularly Johor state is Singapore’s more affordable hinterland. Many make day trips across just to shop and take advantage over their much stronger Singapore dollar. There are two major road links across the Singapore and one of them is chronically congested at peak hours. So with a population of 4 million, Singaporeans on average make 4 trips to Malaysia in 2010. And most of them are day trippers and excursionists and not true international visitors as its definition would imply (true international visitors stay at least 1 night).
Take away these Singaporean visitors and where will Malaysia rank? Way below the top 10. Has the Malaysian government no shame deceiving the world? Actually, France's numbers are also inflated by day trippers where policy and infrastructure makes it easy to cross international borders. Heck, France is the centre of Western Europe. A better statistic would be perhaps hotel night stays and tourism receipts.
A good article in the EDGE magazine
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